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Diamonds As Room-Temperature Superconductors
Stormalong writes "This article describes research into using diamonds as room-temperature superconductors. If successful, perhaps one day you could give your love a diamond engagement CPU instead of a ring!"
Eh....
Diamonds aren't forever, they are only a metastable state.
Besides, "A Diamond is Forever" is a DeBeers marketing sloagan created in the 1920s, not some ancient piece of wisdom.
--
The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
That's what really pisses me off. Diamonds are a very very useful natural resource, but instead of being able to take advantage of that, we're forced to pay huge prices only to have them end up as decorations on some floozy. deBeers is evil.
-hero.
Even if it turns out to be practical, there is still the problem faced by the ceramic superconductors: even if you can get them to ambient temperatures, they still are brittle, rigid, and unmalleable and therefore totally unlike wires. The best you could hope for is to lay these things end-to-end in a trench by the side of the road, and the first earthquake or vibrational disturbance that comes along is going to snap, crack, and pop the circuit open. Unlike wires and fiber optics, which at least stand a chance of anything short of a backhoe.
Ordinary wind power is of far more practical importance than superconductors, fusion, fuel cells, and solar energy combined. However, Slashdot editors regularly pick those topics for the front page. In the rare event that /. does something on wind power, it's always in the non-front-page "Science" section. Come on, "stuff that matters" should actually matter. Did you know that the entire U.S. electrical grid could be powered by less than 150,000 modern wind turbines?
I'd need to see a lot more evidence than what's in a science journal before I'd be willing to buy it.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
One possible method is CVD - Chemical Vapor Deposition. When I was going through High School, for a couple hundred dollars of lab equipment (most of which was usable for other experiments and found in the store room of the chemlab), you could setup a lab to grow a diamond film. Now the diamond film grown there was mostly amorphous carbon, but there were micron-sized diamond crystals embedded in it.
The process involves flowing a mixture of alcohol (-COOH), Water Vapor, and Hydrogen over a hot (2400 degree Centigrade) tungsten filament, flowing the resulting gas over a warm (900 degree Centigrade) Si or Mb plate in an oxygen free environment. The idea being that when the mix hits the tungsten, the alcohol combines with the Hydrogen to from two water molecules, leaving the carbon as a free radical.
This was a repeat of an experiment from the 50's. I imagine they've improved the process to the point of being able to reliably grow larger crystals by now. I seem to remember that the heat differential between the filament and the plate was a problem (smaller heat differential = bigger/better crystals at a trade off of time to grow) and that the substrate was also a problem... an existing diamond crystal seed of some sort would provide a much better substrate. An Si substrate, for instance, means that the attatchment points on the surface of the plate for the carbon free radicals doesn't match what you would find in diamond, so adjacent deposition sites can't work together to form the same larger crystal.
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
You can grow diamond from the vapor phase. (CVD-Diamond). This does work and is state of the art. There are also some people out there who try to grow diamond from a fluid phase using a precursor/solvent, but results have yet to be shown..
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I dont think that the price of artificial diamonds will stay as low as whatever they may be if all of a sudden there is a new application for them.
The artificial diamond makers will then try to pull a "deBeers" on the mrket - which may cause real ones to either drop or rise in price..
DeBeers cartel will either shorten suply of real ones in order to raise price. If there is a huge flood of artificial diamonds it would cause the already super abundant diamonds to seem more rare.
Another angle might be attempts bhy the diamand-mongers to have some study that shows the properties of "Real" diamonds to be superior to "Immitation" diamonds for the purposes of computer applications.
Even if the entire planet converted to 100% wind-powered electricity overnight, the drag on wind flow from all the turbines would be tiny compared to the lost drag caused by deforestation over the past decade alone.
Actually, they could. They control most of the distribution system.
They do have a wildly sucessful marketing unit.
If people stopped buying them for jewlery and there was another use like CPUs DeBeers would still control the market.
The artificial diamond makers will then try to pull a "deBeers" on the mrket..
"de Beers" was able to pull a "de Beers" because the diamond deposits were geographically localized. Artificial diamonds can be produced anywhere. If demand surges, entrepreneurs will fill the supply void and prices will be kept low.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Even if the numbers added up on this deal, social factors are prohibitive. All the major wind farms I've seen are in remote and undesirable areas.There are two related reasons for this. First, the land is cheaper. Second, and more importantly, it avoids the unholy bitching that happens when you do anything industrial near somebody's house. I think a modern windmill is a beautiful thing, but nobody else does. Windmills will only be useful in a distributed, efficient grid. That, and good for disposing of morons and Darwin worthy birds.
Why do I have this? I don't smoke.
For completeness, the exact same comment applies to men who buy Rolexes...
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Because, God knows, women can be counted on for preferring a practical gift over a romantic one.
Which way are you joking? :-) This is why DeBeers had to spend so much money on their advertising campaign in the 1920s; why they had to make a movie thing of surprising the prospective bride with a ring; because, given the choice of him spending two months salary on a ring or on the downpayment on a house, her decision would almost invariably be for the house ... an opinion that she doesn't get a chance to offer if the ring is a surprise.
Certainly in my circle of friends, the average cost of engagement rings is around one week's salary, not two months (by an odd coincidence most of the rings are sapphires of one form or another!); and most of the couples have mortgages (we live in a city where houses are affordable!)
Women do like romance, but it doesn't have to be expensive. The occasional surprise of one kind or another does go down well, but making special time together is far more important! Yes, this means leaving the computer! :-) Even (gasp, choke!) at times that might be inconvenient to you! (Quietly putting up with a bit of inconvenience, making her your priority, does a lot to make your lady feel loved.)
I concur with the other comments about Moore's law and the inappropriateness of an engagement CPU. Buy her the CPU later, when her computer needs upgrading. If the physics is substantiated and the massive climb from possibility to economic production completed, you probably won't be able to see or touch the diamonds inside the chip anyway.
Rachel
This is the wackiest pseudo-economics I've ever read here.
/.?! Go put together a business plan. If you can show your geology is for real, the investors will beat a path to your door.
They will want to drive the price up as far as they can jsut like DeBeers did
This is the goal of every for-profit business. You know why restaurants don't create an artificial shortage of toothpicks and charge you $10 for a wooden implement to clean USDA Prime T-Bone from your teeth? Because unlike De Beers, they have competition.
People believed in mass scale collusion between corporate players in the early 90's when there was a sudden spike in the demand for RAM and the price soared. I still have $33 1 Megabyte SIMMs I bought in the early 90's. After seeing the thirst the public had for SIMMs and the fact they'd pay outrageous prices for them, the market was ripe for an extended "shortage of supply". The existing companies probably tried to play this card... but anybody with enough capital to build a fab in malaysia could start pumping out RAM chips on the cheap. And if they wanted to make money as an unknown brand, they would have to sell their product substantially cheaper than the competition so that the public would accept the risk of an unknown manufacturer. This is exactly what they did... they undercut the big manufacturers... the result... 128MB DIMMs are listed at $16 today on pricewatch... one two hundred fiftieth the cost per meg they were 10 years ago...
What does this have to do with artificial diamonds? Simple, if the demand is high and so is the price, anybody with enough capital to build a fab in malaysia can start producing them cheap.
The RAM chip industry had eager investors and unscrupulous businessmen. Didn't make much difference. Capitalism... it isn't just a neat economic theory. All around you are examples of market demand driving competition and competition driving prices.
The whole argument about diamond deposits being geographically localized is debatable in that there seems to be evidence that diamonds are much more widely available and common than reported
If you know somewhere where there are large deposits of gem quality diamonds... WHY ARE YOU POSTING ON
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)